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 In choosing the name Yediny Peterburg ("United Petersburg") for their new bloc in the Legislative Assembly, 17 deputies in the chamber were apparently looking for a combination of the names of the three factions that all but one of them represent. |
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MOSCOW - A Moscow court on Thursday rejected three lawsuits filed against City Hall by relatives of hostages who died as a result of last fall's theater seige, slashing the hopes of other plaintiffs seeking some $60 million in compensation for their pain and suffering. |
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The Russian edition of "The Leningrad Blockade and Finland: 1941-1944" by Nikolai Baryshnikov, which was released less than a week before this Monday's 59th anniversary of the lifting of the blockade, offers a different take on Finnish involvement in the 900-day siege - a view that has angered some Finns. While the "Great Patriotic War" with Nazi Germany from 1941 to 1945 remains possibly the most significant historical event in the Russian consciousness, and the "Winter War" of 1939 and 1941 following the Soviet invasion of Karelia is still a sore spot in history for some Finns, Finland's role in the Leningrad blockade has largely been ignored by both sides. |
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 MOSCOW - NTV General Director Boris Jordan, who had been keeping a public silence since Gazprom-Media's board of directors fired him as the holding's CEO last Friday, made it clear on Tuesday that he had arrived at a peaceful settlement with his employers at Gazprom, and will go quietly from NTV. |
 MOSCOW - New NTV head Nikolai Senkevich lacks a track record - either good or bad - in television, business and politics, and arguably his only claim to fame so far is his father, longtime television personality Yury Senkevich. So Gazprom's abrupt decision to pick the 34-year-old medical doctor - who most recently served as deputy head of Gazprom's information department - as the new NTV chief sent shock waves through the media community Thursday. |
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Brodsky Contest ST. PETERSBURG (Reuters) - St. Petersburg has picked a shortlist of 24 sculptures competing to honor poet and native son Joseph Brodsky, the Nobel literature prize winner thrown out of the Soviet Union in 1972. |
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 Electric-energy rates are currently too high, according to Andrei Illarionov, economic advisor to President Vladimir Putin, speaking at a press conference on Tuesday. As a result of the high rates for electric power, industrial production costs have increased immensely, leading to slower-than-expected industrial growth and even to contractions in certain economic sectors, he said. |
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MOSCOW - With the dollar steadily declining and U.S. interest rates at record lows, the Central Bank is shifting its gold and hard-currency reserves away from the dollar. |
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MOSCOW - Much to the consternation of its rivals, who say they were left out of the loop, the country's No. 2 cellular operator, Vimpelcom, got a new "corporate" client this month - the State Duma. This month, Beeline gave all 450 Duma deputies access to its network and a Motorola Talkabout 191 handset with which to do so. |
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GHE Sale Disputed ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - The City Administration has filed suit in the St. Petersburg Arbitration Court against St. Petersburg Evaluation Company, which valued a 40. |
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MOSCOW - In one of the largest thefts in Russian corporate history, leading Russian cellphone operator Mobile TeleSystems said Tuesday that someone had stolen a database containing private details of what is estimated to be more than 5 million of its clients. |
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The St. Petersburg Stock Exchange reopened trade in commodity futures on Urals oil on Jan. 15. Urals oil is currently traded on European markets and its price is set monthly by the Economic Development and Trade Ministry. |
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THE other day, a small group of Russia-watchers who had become momentarily bored with talking about Russia asked me to explain quantum computing. This used to be one of my specialties as a science journalist, but the looks on their faces told me that I was making no sense at all - until I said that a good analogy to a quantum computer is President Vladimir Putin. |
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WITH the abrupt firing of Boris Jordan, it is again clear where Vladimir Putin's Kremlin stands on the role of national television. True, there may have been many reasons for firing Jordan, a Russian-American who was appointed general director of NTV after Gazprom's takeover in April 2001 and of Gazprom-Media later that year. |
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I RETURNED from a six-month working hiatus in Denver, Colorado this month to discover that the old neighborhood sure has changed. By "neighborhood" I mean the corridors and offices of the Legislative Assembly, my beat as a journalist here before I left and once again, now that I have returned. |
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 After last year's foreign affairs, Tom Waits-influenced group Billy's Band is returning to the big time in its home city. The band has played hundreds of gigs around St. Petersburg over the past couple of years, but has only now released its official CD debut. |
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Tatyanin Den ("Tatyana's Day"), the open-air daytime affair promoted by student newspaper Gaudeamus at Kirov Stadium on Saturday, turns out to be more than just a showcase for Multfilmy, which is headlining the event. |
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The recently opened cafe Kuvert may have a French word for its name and napkins bearing the image of Paris' Notre Dame Cathedral, but that's about as far as its French connection goes. Instead, when my two dining companions and I entered the eatery on the corner of Gorokhovaya Ulitsa and Kazanskaya Ulitsa, we were greeted by smiling, friendly staff and a live Russian band playing "Sunshine Reggae." The group - consisting of two guitarists and a keyboardist and playing popular songs - was exactly the sort of vocal-instrumental ensemble that was an almost inevitable feature of nicer restaurants in the Soviet Union. Despite the choice of material, the band seemed to be in a blues mood, making the song sound more like a lullaby. |
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 Sergey Gutzait is a high-profile personality in Pavlovsk, the small, picturesque St. Petersburg suburb famous for its palace and park. Best known as an entrepreneur and owner of the celebrated Podvorye restaurant - which numbers President Vladimir Putin among its many VIP guests - Gutzait's community work goes largely unnoticed. |
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Tatyana Tolstaya, best known as a short story writer and an essayist, began writing her first and only novel in 1986. By the time she finished, 14 years later, her country had changed dramatically, and it is continuing to change. But in a way that is very Russian, it has also stayed very much the same. So when "The Slynx," a highly literary novel that tracks the history of Russian culture by way of fantasy and allegory, came out in Moscow in 2000, she was pounced on by readers seeking confirmation of clues that could apply to the present just as easily as they could to the past. Was the blast that sets the stage for the book's strange wintry landscape, inhabited by mutants, mice and the mythical, menacing Slynx, a reference to the nuclear accident at Chernobyl, which took place in 1986? Or was it the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917? Is the book's opening tyrant - a grotesque midget whose full title is Fyodor Kuzmich, Glorybe, the Greatest Murza, Long May He Live - a mutated version of one of Communism's last tsars? Or is he a tiny version of Boris Yeltsin? Was the tyrant that follows him, an obvious caricature of a clean-living KGB colonel, an allusion perhaps to Russia's current president, Vladimir Putin, or to one of his Soviet predecessors? Sitting in the offices of Houghton Mifflin, the book's English-language publisher, Tolstaya, 51, recalled how she had to dispel any notion that she was somehow able to predict the latest twists of Russian history. |
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 It's a novel notion. No, not turning an old television series into a feature film, as the director Betty Thomas and her team have done with "I Spy," but rather shoehorning two actors who are born scene-stealers - Eddie Murphy and Owen Wilson - into a buddy comedy. |
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As a holiday destination, the North Pole might not possess the same popular appeal as Paris or Venice, but for journalist and The St. Petersburg Times contributor Christopher Pala, it was a logical choice. Following several visits to the Arctic with adventure-tourism groups, Pala devised an expedition whereby he and his fiancee would be dropped off by helicopter at the pole and spend a week "riding the polar treadmill" - in other words, they would ski to the pole every day, pitch a tent there and drift away on the constantly moving Arctic ice pack while they slept. |
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Ne mai mesyats: it's sure not May, it's freezing outside; it's the middle of winter; it's not springtime (a jocular expression to describe cold weather). |
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Marlins Hook Catcher MIAMI (AP) - The cost-conscious Florida Marlins expanded their payroll Wednesday by signing 10-time All-Star catcher Ivan Rodriguez to a $10 million, one-year contract. "It was clear to me that this was a special opportunity. It was close to being a no-brainer," Marlins owner Jeffrey Loria said. |
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